Tag Archives: european studies

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the Libraries’ Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship to encourage and inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

The French Revolution Pamphlets Digital Initiative, based at the Newberry Library in Chicago, is a large-scale digitization initiative that makes digital copies of over 38,000 documents, mostly pamphlets, accessible online. The documents, which primarily consist of material published between 1780 and 1810, encompass 850,000 pages of text, and the dataset produced by the project, containing OCR and metadata files, is roughly 11 gigabytes. This collection of French Revolutionary materials is among the most comprehensive in the world, and enriches the study not only of French and European history, but casts light on broader concepts of revolution and social transformation relevant to a global audience. The materials are of interest to numerous fields of study, including legal, social, and cultural history and the history of printing and publication.

The homepage for the project, built in Scalar.

The
collection gathers materials from a number of the Newberry’s collections,
including the French Revolution Collection, the Louis XVI Trial and Execution
Collection, and several smaller groups of French Revolution era material. The
materials chronicle the political, social and religious dimensions of the
Revolution’s history, and include works by a diverse set of authors, including
Robespierre, Marat, and Louis XIV. The texts include arguments both in support
of and opposing the monarchy between 1789 and 1799, and serve as a firsthand
chronicle of the First Republic. The collection includes complete runs of
well-known journals, many rare and unknown publications, and about 3,000 French
political pamphlets published between 1560 to 1653 that document a period of
religious wars and the establishment of the absolute monarchy.

The
main interface for the project was built in Scalar, a free and open source web authoring platform from the The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at USC. The Scalar site links to the
digital copies of the pamphlets, hosted on archive.org, as well as translations of select
pamphlets. The sites also includes a number of other valuable resources,
including data downloads, digital pedagogy materials, and pages designed for
librarians interested in working with the digital collection.

The digitized pamphlets on archive.org.

To
help support scholarship using the collection, the Newberry has funded an open
data grant to support researchers working with the project’s large data set.
The recipients of the
first grant,
Joseph Harder and Mimi Zhou, are conducting a sentiment analysis of the French
Revolution materials, assigning numerical values to word-use in order to code
for positive and negative tone across the data. By applying sentiment analysis
to both the popular press and propaganda, Harder and Zhou hope to find trends
in public opinion throughout the French Revolution, and to see how those trends
shaped the revolution’s political outcomes.

The project’s data on GitHub.

The project serves as
an important contribution to digital scholarship in European Studies. The sheer
volume of the project’s digitized materials alone is impressive, but the
variety of the resources it encompasses makes it particularly distinctive. Its
venture into funding research using an open data grant—and the fact that its
data set is openly available to anyone who wants to download it—is especially
exciting, and I look forward to seeing the scholarship that results from making
these materials freely accessible online. For those interested in exploring
French Revolutionary materials in the UT Austin Libraries, I recommend looking
through our extensive
holdings on the subject, including our collection
of pamphlets, both in
print and on microfilm.

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this new series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

Avant-Gardes and Émigrés is a teaching, learning, and research initiative dedicated to the study of Russian and East European avant-gardists and émigrés in the twentieth century.

Avant-Gardes and Émigrés: Digital Humanities and Slavic Studies, based at Yale University, is a project that aims to develop a research initiative and prototype online environment dedicated to the study of Russian and East European avant-gardists and émigrés in the twentieth century. The project takes a number of different approaches, including topic modeling and network mapping, to explore the networks of avant-garde artists from the former Soviet Union.

One of the project’s goals is to reveal how North American academic departments in Slavic Studies have been shaped by emigration patterns of artists and intellectuals from Eastern Europe. The project uses varied approaches to explore how avant-gardists and émigrés shaped the reading practices, archival and library collections, and institutional formations of Slavic Studies as a field, and the intellectual landscape of American academia more broadly. The project also looks at how ideas from the Soviet Union influenced the dynamics of American culture during the Cold War through institutions, academic practices, theoretical approaches and methodologies, and cultural forums.

Visualization of ongoing research into the network of persons, academic institutions, publications, and archives in the Russian immigration to the United States.

One of the project’s features is an interactive network map connecting émigré writers with publications and places they influenced. You can zoom in on specific regions of the map, click and drag individual elements, and click on particular nodes to see the network that the writer was connected with. The network map features universities’ departments, individual figures, and various publications, and provides an easy-to-use, visual overview of networks that would otherwise be difficult to describe.

Topic modeling algorithmically and iteratively examines the corpus of the journal Slavic Review.

A section of the project based around topic modeling is currently still in development, with the beta version available for viewing online. A topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering the abstract topics that occur in a collection of document, and draws from the fields of machine learning and natural language processing. The main section of this project is focused on topic modelling the Slavic Review, a major journal devoted to the study of Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, but the site also features preliminary topic modeling of the Slavic & East European Journal and the Russian Review. The topic models allow users to navigate words from the publications that have been analyzed, and clicking on individual words brings up additional information about where the words show up in individual documents within their respective corpus.

The project serves as an important contribution to digital scholarship in the Slavic Studies field. Its varied approaches to visualizing and analyzing the networks it seeks to foreground provides a valuable and accessible window into these networks, making them visible in a way that is only possible through digital methodologies. I highly recommend looking through the other aspects of the project I didn’t cover, including the student contributions from the Brodsky Lab and Avant-Gardes and Emigres Digital Humanities Lab, to explore the subject matter more in-depth. I would also recommend looking through related materials in the UT Austin Libraries’ collections, including our holdings of the Slavic Review both online and in print.